I don’t blame the ones who hated me. If I wasn’t interested in the subject, I was a royal pain in the class, either chatting sports (three of my best friends had last names that also started in “M,” which was accidental brilliance for seating arrangements), writing notes to my girlfriend or dreaming of some utopia that included my awesome job as general manager of the New York Mets.

I was always dreaming.

By the time baseball season rolled around during my freshman year at Spencerport High School in Rochester, N.Y., I had yet to play the game I had always unquestionably loved. Friends convinced me to try out, so I did.

Thankfully, there were no cuts.

I was small and quick but my swing was better suited for a golf club, so naturally I played second base and hit at the bottom of the order. I found other ways to contribute.

In addition to my role as bunter, I was part-assistant coach and part-historian, explaining to our best right-handed hitter why he shouldn’t be looking for an outside pitch with a man on second base or lobbying to my coach for more playing time because my .400 on-base percentage was a more important statistic than my .200 batting average (years later, he admitted I had a point).

Being on the bench at least gave me time to think, and I dreamed of my future job in baseball. I applied to seven business schools across the country and finally settled on Northeastern University, where I could major in “business management,” which seemed fitting for my role as a future general manager.

After two jobs in finance made me somewhat miserable, I started dreaming again. I had spent so much time at work reading about sports that I decided to be the man behind the keyboard.

Six months after leaving my job on Wall Street, I was working for The Boston Globe, churning out features on local athletes and working the phones from Peabody to Westborough to Duxbury.

I was clueless. I was writing in space once reserved for legends. I hardly believed I was cut out for the job.

So I made rules for myself, said I would be genuine, dedicated and never a muckraker. I found out my naiveté was my best asset and wrote about things nobody else cared to dive into.

By 2011, I was given a shot at MLB.com to cover the Red Sox alongside veteran beat reporter Ian Browne.

And then it hit me: This is where I’m supposed to be. Baseball is a game made for dreamers. We love this game because it’s unpredictable. You can study it with the eyes or with numbers (the Red Sox at one point were considered 99.6 percent favorites to make the playoffs in 2011), and it can still leave you speechless.

We enjoy having hopes that are too high and expectations that are near-impossible to reach, yet for some reason we believe they’ll come true. The illusion of the game is what allows you watch a home run or diving catch and think, if only for a second, that you could make that play. Maybe the line that separates baseball fans from the superstar players isn’t all that wide.

Perhaps we’re too optimistic.

Remember the summer of 1998, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa went back-and-forth in the home run chase? In retrospect, we can say we were foolish to think there was any integrity to the whole charade. How could we believe that two players could each break the single-season home run record in the same season? But I bet if you take a step back and really think about what you did that summer, you’ll also remember checking the highlights every night or reading the newspaper each morning for updates. The illusion of history trumped the negative truths of reality, and we forgot the artificial factor that played such a large role in the whole thing.

Or maybe we simply chose to ignore it. Baseball has a way of helping us see what we want to see.

That brings me to my next job the Red Sox beat writer for MassLive.com. I began on Monday.

In a time when many journalism outlets are downsizing, MassLive is blossoming with a constant flow of original content thanks to a talented team of enthusiastic people. Though I have big shoes to fill after Evan Drellich established a well-respected voice for the site’s baseball coverage, I’m excited to form my own voice and eager to hear from others (leave a comment here, at my Twitter page @JMastrodonato or drop me an email and I promise to get back to you).

Hopefully I can paint the picture for you, present you with the colorful images of Fenway Park, the theater that accompanies each new Red Sox season, and give you a chance to see what you want to see.